Why can't *I* have a wife?

I remember travelling to Spain, at the beginning of 1995, when I lived there. I got as cheap a flight as I could, which meant that it was at a very ungoldy hour in the morning when I had to get up off my brother's floor in north London, get the first tube and make the journey through the dawn dark across town to Gatwick.

I remember driving myself to school, in the summer of 1989, while my mother was away on holiday for two weeks. She had left some food for me, but I was definitely alone in the house - Mum had gone on holiday with her cousins to Italy in the days before mobiles or the interweb.

I remember getting on the train alone, saying goodbye to Kate, leaving her on the platform in Manchester, where I'd gone to stay with her at university for the first time. I was 14.

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There is nothing like leaving alone. Nothing. It can be devastating or exciting, anticipatory or tearful, but it is always exhilarating. That luxurious feeling of alone when you are indeed by yourself, but you have a gorgeous lattice-work of friends and family somewhere in the world, keen to know about you, loving, familiar, your invisible shadow. There are other alones that are not fun or cool or things I want to know about: a fully, vertiginous aloneness where there is no one who will offer me a mattress for the night or lend me a fiver. No siree. I've read about those alones, had them described to me, but I do not need to experience them.

I am about to leave Cape Town alone. Martin and Jacques help me get my stuff to the car. I've been packing for days, I've kind of been packing forever. I'm always in and out of one bag or another. I love packing to leave, even when I don't want to leave, I love the packing. I think it's probably got something to do with owning too much stuff: packing to leave, the kind of packing where you know you can get the stuff in your suitcase/rucksack/handbag because that's how the stuff got here in the first place, makes me relax. Not the packing to go. I hate initial packing to leave home as much as the next person who always carries too much stuff and has to take multiple bras, even for a couple of days away. Packing to go is one of the few things that makes sense of the Christian idea of purgatory, of hell, of the very devil himself. He's imaginary most of the time, but Lucifer is sitting on the end of my bed tossing paperwork and tights at me when I'm packing to go.

As someone who always has too much stuff I feel great when I can get things in a bag, everything I have that needs to go in the bag goes in the bag. This is not true of any other part of my life: draws are overflowing, cupboard doors are forced shut, things spill off.... other things which teeter on the edge of furniture I have half painted/sanded/mended, and land in great drifts by the things which fell there seven weeks before.

I'm as happy as a sandboy packing to leave. Marvelous. And we've had a top fairwell do. Luckily the last few days in Cape Town are so busy, so eventful, so interesting that I find myself suddenly at a play reading and then suddenly leaving the play reading and suddenly preparing the flat and then people are arriving, talking, meeting. My mum and my aunt are here. I've been thinking about these Cape Town people meeting them both, especially as they appear in the play, for a while. Luckily Martin and Jacques have been very good at getting things ready for the party too. I find myself horribly wanting as a hostess, not through lack of wanting to make people feel happy, at their ease. But I fear I am so much not at my ease that I have no sense of proportion and find myself frozen with worry that I'm not cutting the celery into the right shaped pieces, that my gin and tonics are too tonicy (making me stingy) or too ginny (making me something far worse), that there's too much potato and not enough salad cream.... in the cheesecake. Every decision I make is surely wrong.

God, how I wish I had a wife. We should all have a wife. Lots of my mates, even now, in 2013, have lovely, old-fashioned wives, who produce drinks, souffles, children, while my mates get to chat to guests and shelf-wrangle. Why can't I have that? Oh, yeah, it's because I can't have anyone: nobody wants me. Yep, yep, I remember now, there's  no need to go on about it.

Martin and Jacques make it look like a party and the guests make it a party and I treat it like a party, so it's  party. And it's so hard to say goodbye that one guest comes the next morning to wish us bon voyage, birthday gift for the impending day in hand. She was a friend of Kate's. It is unexpectedly difficult to let go of all this, never mind we're off for a few days' holiday, never mind I'll be in wonderful company, never mind we have some shows to look forward to in Jo'burg, I just don't want to say goodbye. As the opportunity that is Cape Town finally closes down on me I want it more than anything else I can think of, more, even, than that darn man.

I hug Martin and Jacques on the street, even though I'll be seeing them later, and I drive out of the Mother City. I'm picking up Mum and My Littlest Auntie on the way, but for now I am alone, beautifully alone, as if this were my natural state, and, with all the farewells done - for now, fleetingly - I can pretend that Kate is beside me and that we are off on one of our adventures.

If I'm looking right at you why am I missing you?

March 2013
People  have a drink and they say things they don't mean, do things they'll regret. It's part of being human. And enthusiastic. And, often, English - you don't want to speak your mind, best say yes for now, and get out the door.
So I was at that lecture, having had too much wines, too many wine... drunk too much and someone called Zavick is saying we should take the show to his studio - he's an artist. Yeaaaah! Let's do that!!!! That will be great. Yessssssss.
And then it's the next day and a man I don't know is trying to friend me up on facebook. Who the hell is... he's the artist from last night. Okay. Fine.
A few days later I'm walking over to Gardens where his studio is to have a look round. He really is an artist and he really does have a big studio, with other artists renting space and a fabulous thing called toilet cubicalism going on (see the attached photo). We talk about the show, about the art he makes, about his recent clear-out which has helped him get back to the art he wants to make. My gut fills with the thought of my stuff-bound flat, lots of that stuff being my sister's belongings, some of it still in boxes, and my terrible, miserable inertia, my inability to get rid of things or even move them, look at them... the way I hide from them, which is not easy as they surround me, day in, day out....
While I've been lost in thought, Zavick has made some tea is looking at possible dates on his wall planner, he's got started on making an event page on facebook.  He has the energy of a five year old. He doesn't seem even to have developed the ennui of a nine year old yet, he's in very bright toddlerdom; he has much more energy than my roommate, who's not yet eight months. I wonder whether I've ever met a person of his age with this much energy. I guess that he is, depressingly, about my age. It's depressing and impressive. He is also very dyslexic and so I take over for a bit at the computer, writing whatever copy we agree on, and we agree quickly, just getting on with it. We are both excited about the show coming to Studio41. I'm not sure what Martin will think.... but he's on holiday in Namibia, very short on mobile phone coverage let alone interweb, and I decide we'll do the show whatever and Martin will think whatever he thinks, but he'll get on with it too. I'm pretty sure he'll like Zavick.
In general Cape Town is starting to spin around me, gently at first, but with increasing urgency as I approach the date when I will be sucked out of the plughole and hurled back onto the road towards Johannesburg. It affects my sense of proportion and already pretty poor ability to make decisions. My mother and aunt will arrive before we leave, we'll do the Studio41 gig, we'll have a little gathering at the flat for a few of the fabulous people we've met on our time here. And then we'll leave.
I knew this would happen and that it would happen like this: I'll've been here two months and some of the weeks have dragged out... not necessarily unpleasantly, but languorously, as if they were going to last forever. I've known all along that they would not, and they knew it too. We have both known that time would speed up and I'd be stuffing experiences and people and sights and sounds and hopes into the vanishing hours like the burglar does into his bag in a nice Cape Town flat, fear of missing out on something great bearing down on us both; knowing that even if we do come back, the flat will not be the same as it is today. Today provides only today's experiences.
I've endured the heartbreak and confusion it threw me into, I'm starting to rise, vulture-like, from the ashes of my hope, ready to feed on the carrion of the next car crash in my life.  Feeling this raw confusion I wander the city seeing all kinds of work in the huge festival that is Infecting the City. Once a year the city is overrun with art, lots of it performance art, but also visual art. Frustratingly I miss shows or can't find venues, but I also see lots of things, some by mistake, bump into people I know, get a black eye helping someone up onto a wall - it's like any other visit to the theatre. I even get to see an UK director I know who has made one of the pieces - small performing world. It's not like any festival I've been to before and is all the more marvelous for it.
The night before the Studio41 show, four new tyres down, Jacques and Martin arrive back in Cape Town, with tales of the desert, some stones they've lifted and a pile of washing. For me the performance is yet another great experience. Zavick has brought some great people together and a few of my mates come, and it's like no other show I've done. I have to be careful not to touch the audience, so close are they, but also not to destroy the art behind my back. I spend more time sitting down that usual.
Afterwards, yet again, I meet such interesting people people who have suffered, people what feel so strongly about theatre, art, South Africa. Even though my mother and aunt land tomorrow for a three-week holiday, including a few days off for me, even though I am longing for Johannesburg, my first love, even though I want to leave this place which has broken my heart, I can feel the regret, I am missing Cape Town already. I'm still here and I'm missing it. Why can't I just be here and enjoy it and deal with the change when I leave? What is wrong with me? Naturally over-acquainted with grief, that's my diagnosis, too ready to anticipate it. My musicality, my skills as a show-off and my feelings of loss when simply contemplating something I love, let alone someone: these were all bequeathed to me by my father, the last one because he was too full of life  himself to live past 42, or at least that's how he fills my memories.
People gather in the flat on the Thursday evening, our last night in Cape Town. Mark and Ikeraam and my tiny roommate have already left for our holidayette, and so I am hosting a bit of a do in their flat. These are very nice people, I wonder why I ever wanted to leave: the sun sets and every new position it takes makes yet another preternaturally beautiful scene out of the city spread before and below us. One friend who attends has not been to this building since she tried to blow it up in the 1990s, another tells her that it's good to meet her, that she was out on the street protesting to get her released from prison.
Well, at least I'm not leaving South Africa.

The trouble with lemurs

Tuesday 11 February

"The trouble with lemurs is the same as the trouble with meerkats: they make very poor pets because they mark the house and their owners." Wikipedia

I am aware that I arrived at Mark and Ikeraam's place on 18 January, to fizzy wine, fabulous supper and a Cape Town sunset to simultaneously break my heart and make me believe all is possible.

But I worry.

I worry that by, or before, 22 March, our scheduled date for the beginning of the drive to Jo'burg, they will be so irritated by me, my stuff, by our romantic suppers for three, by my choice of foreign language DVDs, my dull cooking, my lack of cooking (in most UK homes I'd be okay because I'm up for the washing up, but here we have Staff, so even if I do the washing up I'm ingratiating myself with her, and not with the chaps, which is not to say I'm not for trying to charm Staff....), my every-so-often managing to be caught in a state of tears due to my broken heart, the strangeness of my working schedule, my inability to turn the lights off at night without turning all the lights on first - well, actually, that's their architect's fault - and legion other smaller and larger annoyances about ME will make them want to throw me off this, the 12th floor.

I raise the issue one day:
"I've had offers to stay with other people... you know... while I'm here."
"Oh."
"How, you know, would that be? Maybe I should."
"Well, itt's up to you."
"Well, I was thinking it was more, you know, up to you guys."
"If you do go, don't go for long."

No more information than I had before, possibly, even slightly less, given a rather heightened sense of paranoia and broken-heartedness and, well, I have no idea what else in the mix.

I stay put.

Before Martin and Jacques return from Namibia, I have my lecture to deliver. My lecture about journalist safety at City Varsity. That lecture I agreed to on that sunny afternoon, writing happily with Vanessa, feeling pretty much invincible. Yeah, that one. I write it down and everything - a radical break with my usual routine of... not writing things down properly. I do put in some sections where I am going to riff, or do bits of the show, but basically I trawl my brain, the death and danger stats on the CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) website, rifle through my passionately-held beliefs about press freedom and the state we are all in, and and and....

And.... who knows what they thought of the lecture. I kept remembering to look at my notes and I covered most of that stuff, about how journalism has changed and the risks that there are and not to be bullied into going anywhere, but to remain ambitions - don't let anyone take that either; that journalists are bound to be at risk, terrible things will happen, which doesn't met we ought not to let people go if they want to, unless we really ought not to let them go; that risk assessments are there for the protection of the employer; that broadcasters, papers etc are not necessarily your friend after you're dead and they may try to close down official lines of enquiry, may threaten your family with legal action, as the BBC did to us.

But that was all so serious and I know listeners need some light relief, so next we play guess the five most dangerous countries for journalists since 1992. It takes ages, they're way off-beam. Mali is in the news, and that's one of the guesses; I make a joke about it not being there yet, but, you know, just wait.

They get Iraq, but they don't get the others:

1. Iraq
2. Philippines
3. Algeria
4. Russia
5. Pakistan

Mostly they've never heard of Algeria, so it being in the top five is a double-whammy. We are having so much fun, we look at the next five and yes, I make a joke about Kate's country of death not making it into the top five and how frustrating that is for a high-achiever like me. We find India surprising:

6. Somalia
7. Columbia
8. Syria
9. India
10.Mexico

Some of these folk will go on to be music journalists, the majority not to be journalists at all, I'm sure, if my experience of further education is anything to go by. I wonder about my relevance here. Who knows whether there is any point to me at all, this lecture or, you know, on the planet at all.

But I feel vindicated. It turns out I know some stuff, I really have become a journalist safety expertine (a small expert). It's not my career, I tell them at the outset, it's more of a hobby. I tell them that journalists and their managers have told me, have told my family, that we are not allowed to comment because we are not journalists. At the time, years ago, I was too damaged, too nauseous, too afraid to say a word. These days I'd point out to them that a journalist is someone who gathers and then disseminates information: there is no club, you don't need a certificate; I'd tell them to get over themselves.

I'd tell them that the trouble with me is that I have been touched by the meerkat of murder, by the knowledge and experience of the hell my sister went through because her employers failed to stop her thinking she had to go to Somalia to keep her job, and that it has marked my home (still full of boxes of Kate's stuff) and my psyche and my tenuous future. I have been visited by the lemur of learning and I feel duty-bound to pass it on. Because it's not about me, it's about incredible people all over the world risking their lives to get the story out: if I can't get that story out, then what am I?